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Last month, the Labor Department reported that about 14 million
people were out of work.

The unemployment rate remains stubbornly high above 9 percent,
where it's been stuck since May 2009, and Friday's jobs report
isn't expected to show much improvement in the stalled labor
market.

But another government statistic reported each month paints a
more nuanced picture of the employment situation in the United
States.

It's called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a
relatively new report that was started by the Labor Department in
late 2000. Its latest report showed approximately 3.2 million job
openings in July in the United States, about the same number as
June.

The total number of openings is up about 1.1 million jobs from
July 2009, but it's still short of the 4.4 million openings
reported in December 2007. Although there are about four active
job seekers for every current job opening, the survey shows that
even in a slow-growing economy, there are job opportunities for
applicants with the right skills and education.

"The economy itself remains dynamic," says Patrick O'Keefe,
director of economic research at accounting firm J.H. Cohn and
former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of
Labor. "It may not be as dynamic during a downturn ... but the
labor market is constantly shifting."

"That clearly speaks to the skills gap that exists," says Thom
Ruhe, director of entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation. "So we've got this paradigm of millions that are
unemployed, yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of jobs
that are available if we had the right skilled labor to put
there, so there's a challenge."

Of the companies surveyed, 96 percent said they plan to add
employees in 2012, and 41 percent say they expect to hire more
than 20 people next year. The challenge is finding the right
employees.

Going forward, labor experts say one of the most troubling trends
in the jobs market is the number of long-term unemployed—workers
who have been out of work for at least six months and have looked
for a job within the last 30 days. Currently, that group includes
six million Americans—or 43 percent of the total number of
unemployed workers.

The average duration of unemployment now stands at about 40
weeks, meaning many job seekers have been unemployed for almost a
full year. Experts worry that the long-term unemployed are losing
the skills that once made them valuable before they lost their
jobs. "[There is] a mismatch between the demands of the job and
the qualifications of the applicants," O'Keefe says. "That
mismatch is the reason why willing individuals go unemployed and
important jobs go unfilled."

Earlier surveys have revealed similar trends. In May, ManPower
released its
sixth-annual talent shortage survey. In it, 52 percent of
U.S. employers said they were having difficulty filling
mission-critical positions within their companies, up from 14
percent in 2010, an all-time high for the survey.

When asked why they were having trouble filling positions, two of
the most popular answers employers gave were "lack of 'hard' job
skills or technical skills" (47 percent) and "lack of experience"
(35 percent). "The expectations for various positions are rising
as companies are trying to get people to do more with less or do
more with the same," says Jonas Prising, president of the
Americas at ManPower.

For instance, strong typing skills used to be the critical skill
for administrative assistants, but these days, the position often
requires information technology skills such as coordinating
webinars or using publishing platforms like Microsoft PowerPoint.

Prising's biggest concern is that many of the unemployed get left
behind in today's leaner, more educated economy. In addition to
what Prising calls the "unprecedented" long-term unemployment
rate, he also points to a high youth unemployment rate. About 25
percent of teenagers are currently unemployed. "There's a clear
bifurcation between the 'haves' and the 'have nots,'" he says.
"You have large parts of the population that just aren't
employable."